Military might no match for Inuit know-how

By Katlia Lafferty – Nunavut News

From the summer 1987 issue of The Beaver, there’s a story about how the Canadian army and Canadian air force travelled to the Far North in the mid-’40s to test their abilities to operate in the Arctic winter.

“Operation Musk-ox” would travel from Churchill, Man., to Baker Lake. Baker Lake was once in the NWT but is now in Nunavut. The article covering this military expedition is written by Donald Storr and is based on his journals while in the field. Storr was a civilian meteorologist, and his job was to advise the commander-in-chief on the weather conditions — one of those jobs was to observe the Northern lights. The crew of men who called themselves the Baker Lake Party were no more than seven in total, and they had two tractors on a Cat train, a caboose and three sleds with supplies, including a keg of navy rum that the men rationed to two ounces per day each.